Donald Trump has been dealt a devastating blow to his authority with a succession of crushing defeats in the midterm elections, in which his Republican party was stripped of control of the Senate and the House as his handpicked “Maga” candidates were swept away by a blue tsunami.
The president spent weeks before the election pleading with the American people to pretend he was on the ballot. He may now rue that tactic: the American people took him at his word, and delivered him a bloody nose of historic proportions, flinging his presidency into lame duck status.
He appeared last night to have changed his mind, declaring on social media: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
As the night progressed, one shock followed another as the rout extended into parts of the US once considered safe Republican strongholds. Top of the list was Texas, the state that has come to epitomise the iron fist of modern Republican rule.
In a seismic shift, James Talarico became the first Democrat to be sent by Texas to the US Senate since 1988. A Democratic dream of flipping the state that has been frustrated in countless previous cycles finally came to pass.
The Presbyterian seminarian used his faith combined with a stringent call for economic justice to undermine 30 years of Texas Republican rule. In the process he took down Trump’s controversial pick, the scandal-ridden state attorney general, Ken Paxton, despite hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the race by Republicans, including funds from Elon Musk.
“Against big money and big odds we took our power back,” Talarico said in his victory speech. He slammed the negative campaign that had been waged by his opponent, which he said amounted to the “final howls of a dying establishment, the death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered”.
In a double whammy, out too went Greg Abbott, a titan of Texas Republican politics. He was ousted by Gina Hinojosa, who becomes the first Democratic governor of Texas in 36 years.
Her elevation to the state’s highest office as its first Latina governor stands in itself as a repudiation of the Trump administration. The brutal mass deportation campaign unleashed by ICE against Hispanics in Texas was one of Trump’s most resounding own goals, as it pushed away droves of voters who had backed him only two years ago.
In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and progressive insurgent, made history in winning the closely watched Senate race, defeating the Republican Mike Rogers and becoming the country’s first Muslim senator.
His opponent and detractors, including Trump, led a largely Islamophobic campaign against him, often pointing to his name and faith, including the president alleging he was a “jihadist” and that he would need to walk through a metal detector to get into the Senate.
“They want an America that is too small for some of us,” El-Sayed said. “We know that America is big enough for all of us.”
The pattern of stunning Republican defeats was repeated across the country, from the East Coast through the plains, and even deep into the American South. It amounted to a withering rebuke of Trump’s broken promises, economic follies, and war with Iran at a time when many American families are struggling to put food on the table and gas in their tanks.
The list of astounding results extended to Kansas, a state that until recent days lay well beyond even the most optimistic Democrats’ wildest fantasies. Adam Hamilton, a mega-church pastor, becomes the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in the state in 94 years.
He throws out Roger Marshall, the incumbent, who became a poster boy for Republican callousness when it was revealed he had sued 700 of his own patients for failing to pay him their medical bills when practising as a doctor.
Among the most jaw-dropping results of the night was the victory of Annie Andrews, a Democratic pediatrician, in the deeply conservative southern state of South Carolina. She defeated Darline Graham, the sister of late Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, marking the first time South Carolina has sent any Democrat to the Senate since 1998.
Trump had personally persuaded Graham to stand for election in her brother’s seat. She had her misgivings, aware of her lack of experience which she fatally exposed during an election debate in which she said that national security was “not my thing”.
In Maine there was another shock when just before 1am Susan Collins conceded to Democrat Troy Jackson, letting go of a Senate seat she had held for almost 30 years.
Trump spent the night watching his party’s disaster unfold on a White House TV set. He was reportedly fuming.
Though he is unlikely to admit it publicly, the extent of the personal drubbing he experienced on Tuesday night cannot be exaggerated. A political leader who appeared over the past 10 years to have a unique touch that protected him from the perils that befall mortal politicians had waved his magic wand, and this time nothing happened.
Democrats will be hoping that a prediction made by leading pundits just a few days ago now could now hold substance: that Tuesday night may come to be seen as marking the end of the Trump era.
It was a night in which the American people spoke more loudly and clearly than many had anticipated. As such, it could also have enormous implications for Trump’s final two years in office, and with it the immediate future of the US and the world.
Hakeem Jeffries is now poised to become the first Black speaker of the House in US history. “America is back,” he said on Tuesday night. “Today begins the great American comeback. The American people have spoken all across the land, from sea to shining sea, and made clear they have had enough of the extremism and corruption.”
Democrats flipped critical Republican House seats across the country, extinguishing some already dwindling GOP seats in places such as New York and New Jersey, and scoring upsets in deep red districts in states from Tennessee to Texas.
They also scored a string of victories in districts that Republicans redrew to their advantage earlier this year.
From January, the incoming Democratic caucus will enjoy a majority whose final numbers have yet to be finalised but not its whopping scale. So emboldened, they have indicated they will use their newly acquired oversight and subpoena powers aggressively to investigate the most egregious of Trump’s excesses.
That includes the president’s financial enrichment of himself and his family, which Democratic leaders have said amounts to corruption.
The incoming Democratic majority is also likely to hit the White House with a blizzard of war powers resolutions designed to pressure Trump to end his war with Iran. Democratic leaders are preparing to challenge his tariffs regime, work to rein in ICE and its mass deportation efforts, and move to reinstate cuts to Medicaid, healthcare subsidies and other welfare benefits.
Pete Hegseth, the combative defense secretary, is also in Democratic crosshairs.
With the Senate also under their control, Democrats will have the power to block many of Trump’s judicial and cabinet appointments. They are unlikely though to be able to pass major legislation, given the 60-vote filibuster, but they will want to be seen trying to bring sustenance to hard-up working people.
“Five words for the American people,” the Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said. “Relief is on the way.”
Trump has already made clear that he intends to block any Democratic-initiated legislation by wielding what he called “tremendous powers”. To ram the point home, Trump released a photo of a red Maga hat on Tuesday night, with the word Maga replaced with “VETO”.
Despite such characteristic bluster, Trump will find it hard to argue away a night of unrelenting terrible results. As John King, the CNN political analyst, put it, “this is the collapse of the president’s party on live TV”.
Alarm bells for the Republicans began ringing early in the night, with Jon Ossoff winning re-election to his Georgia senate seat shortly before 8pm on the east coast. That the Democrat swatted away his Trump-endorsed challenger Mike Collins so comfortably, in a state which the president won two years ago, set the compass needle in for what was to come.
Less than half an hour later, still chillingly early in the evening for Trump and his party, Democrats picked up the first of four senate seats they needed to retake the upper chamber. Former governor Roy Cooper defeated another Trump chosen one, the former national Republican party chair, Michael Whatley.
Such a convincing win is likely further to elevate Ossoff in the hearts of Democrats as a potential 2028 presidential candidate. He proved himself during the campaign to be a fearsome debater, fundraising juggernaut, and savvy social media operator – three skills that Democrats will be desperately seeking in two years’ time as they look to prevent a Trump successor in the White House.
There were implications too from Tuesday night for a leading Republican contender for the 2028 presidential race, JD Vance. The incumbent senator in the Ohio seat he vacated when he became Trump’s vice-president, John Husted, was another one to bite the dust when he was defeated by the former Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown.
Like Texas, Ohio also experienced a double whammy. In addition to the Senate seat, the governor’s mansion also fell to the Democrat Amy Acton. It was another astonishing blow for a Trump-endorsed candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy who alienated many voters when he released one of the most contentious election adverts in recent memory featuring Acton’s estranged mother from whose custody she had been removed when she was 12.
“Ohio has chosen unity and decency over division and hate,” Acton said at her party HQ. “The healing begins today.”
